AI or marketing hype? (My first lunch and learn at work)

(Names covered up to protect the privacy of my coworkers).

The first talk, in 3 partsMy goal for the first session was to set the stage for what’s to come next.

I split the talk into 3 parts:The story of the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, his relation to Toronto, and why everyone should know who he is and be proud to be living in such a great technology hub.

A walk-through of the definitions of data science, machine learning, in an attempt to recreate the process I went through when I was first trying to wrap my head around all these terms.

This is where the “AI or marketing hype?” part came in.

Why we should all care.

I used an example borrowed from a talk I went to by a venture capitalist: In the 90s, companies wondered how to build their internet strategy.

In the 2000s, having an internet strategy was a given, but the next big question was how to build a mobile strategy.

Now in the 2010s, the question isn’t about an internet or mobile strategy, those are a given.

The question is how to harness AI.

AI is going to go the way of internet and mobile- it’ll be integrated into all businesses.

In the future, every company will be an AI company, in some respect.

So even if you don’t care about AI, you’ll have to care.

AI or marketing hype?I was nervous about this part of the talk.

I wanted to get a discussion going, and make a point that the term “artificial intelligence” means different things depending on who you’re talking to.

A computer scientist would give a very different answer than a non-technical marketing manager.

And there’s nothing wrong with that!This “game” was supposed to be controversial.

Supposed to be.

It ended up being very… uncontroversial.

But still fun.

The game was as follows.

I’d show the audience different images of products that could be viewed as either “AI” or “marketing hype,” depending on who you’re talking to.

I’d stand there, and let them discuss among themselves, and wait for their answer: was it AI or marketing hype?Here’s some examples of what I showed my coworkers, along with their responses:1.

Old school Amazon product recommendations.

Source: mageplaza.

com.

Audience’s answer: marketing hype.

(Same as my answer).

2.

Autonomous vehicles.

Source: phys.

org.

Audience’s answer: marketing hype.

(Not the same as my answer).

3.

Roomba (the vacuum cleaner that remembers the layout of your living room).

Audience’s answer: marketing hype.

Definitely marketing hype.

(Not my answer).

4.

Google’s autocomplete/sentence suggestion.

Audience’s answer: AI (after some discussion).

(Not the same as my answer).

5.

ChatbotsAudience’s answer: Marketing hype.

(My answer: it depends).

So what is AI?At the end of the game, I told the audience what sort of product I believe merits the term “AI.

” I told them that I think of AI as a machine learning driven system that interacts with the real world.